Artists Reach Out: Becca Blackwell

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Becca Blackwell

Becca Blackwell
(photo: Max Bernstein)

Becca Blackwell is a NYC-based trans actor, performer and writer. Existing between genders, and preferring the pronoun "they," Blackwell works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D'Amour. Film/TV includes: Ramy, High Maintenance, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman's Barstool, and Jack in the Box. Becca is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, Franklin Furnace Award and the Creative Capital Award.

Becca Blackwell
(photo: Kevin Yatarola)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

I was in the middle of performing a new solo show called Schmermie’s Choice that was a bit of an extension of my prior show They, Themself and Schmerm. And the tour of Half Straddle’s show that I had worked on with creator/director Tina Satter, Is This a Room, had all the tours canceled (or postponed? Nah...most likely canceled).

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice. 

I got an in-school suspension and my drama teacher (I took that elective instead of journalism because it was less work) said I should try being in a play. I loved rehearsal and realized I had horrific stage fright. My college counselor, L’Tanya Evans, pushed me to audition for theater, and I got a little scholarship at a small liberal arts college and went. I realized in 1991 that Ohio theater was not something that knew what to do with me and came to NYC where I eventually found more queer people to make art with. I joined Circus Amok in 1999 and blessedly have found more and more community that I connected with. As there became a more opening of queer work that could be in larger formats meant that I could start to figure out how to make a living in the arts. That and grants I have received have kept me in the game.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I am using this time to get to the root of all my beliefs, no matter how uncomfortable. And then envisioning a world where deep self love can allow us to let go of a lot of concepts that limit us. Realizing that micro and macro are right there together. I am prioritizing the things that my work to maintain a career never would give me the time to do. More music, more reading, more learning languages, skills I always wished I had the time to cultivate. Listening to my body and not my mind. Thinking about a world where health and connection to nature is considered the baseline not the first thing we need to give up in order to survive. Deep listening, not to figure out but to allow myself to truly see. Also, I would like to re-enact every Murder She Wrote episode with my favorite people. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. That is sometimes all I think about. It might save some part of the world if I made that.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

That is the biggest goal...to actually see what I want to vision in my practice! The more I can truly love myself and offer the same compassion to myself that I have been trying to offer to others, the more I can actually truly love others. I am realizing the art I am curious about is reaching out and expanding. And most of what I do is rooted in humor because, when we laugh, our hearts open up. I am trying to find that line of cracking things open and seeing the filth as a gift. And as a way of finding many ways to see things. Our perspectives are all we have...so how do I want to see the world? It goes back to what my beliefs are, that is how I see the world. That’s the circle I am in. And I’m unpacking it as best as I can, learning and learning and (fingers crossed) also growing.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I wake up every morning knowing that this is the biggest obstacle...my mind. My mind likes to take the train to "panic town" and "self doubt town," sometimes to "you’re an asshat and a has-been town" and ALL kinds of other mini stops along the way. I know that the world now is one in a lot of emotional crisis. Myself included in this.

So, that is what I am deeply trying to rewire, that instinct to go to the worst case scenario, but instead SEE the future of each of us expanding. That this time even in its deepest, darkest place can lead to a place of possibility and SEE myself in a world/community that reflects that, encourages that and embraces that.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Triple "Realness" at Abrons: Lamar + Markey + Shelton Mann

As if the expected adventure of American Realness were not enough, I decided to turn it up a notch, at the last minute, by slipping in an extra show between the two I had already scheduled to see yesterday. So, basically, from around 5:30 to 10pm, I lived at Abrons Arts Center, dashing from M. Lamar (Destruction) to Erin Markey (A Ride on the Irish Cream) to Sara Shelton Mann (Sara (the smuggler)) with hurried bathroom breaks in between.

It was a popular evening at Abrons with the last two of these shows sold out, although the festival can always create ways to cram in the desperate. The extra audience seating at Sara (The Smuggler) tested me for claustrophobia, though I made it through just fine.

Markey's on for several more shows in Abrons's Experimental Theater before the end on Sunday, and her personal chemistry with co-star Becca Blackwell (so winning as "Irish Cream," a boat or a horse or...) anchors all the wild, comic tanginess and simmering eroticism. Accompanied by a rock band with music by Markey, Emily Bate and Kenny Mellman, this production is alive, crazed, relentless, voracious and completely irresistible. I'm glad I took a chance and made it in. (Click for scheduling/ticketing info.)

For Lamar's 70-minute solo, Destruction, the audience looks on from within a dimly-lit space (Abrons's Underground Theater) with a ceiling sloping darkly and heavily over a shallow performance area. The gloom and compression suit this project. An operatic lament co-written with Tucker Culbertson, Destruction calls vengeance on white supremacy and racist violence through art director Sabin Michael Calvert's creepy visuals (smoky stone crypt; coffin; handsome Black male corpse; severe subtitles) and the performer's countertenor pyrotechnics and piano work. Think Diamanda Galás but, in Lamar's words, "Negrogothic Devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition." Lamar's vocals dip into the good well of Black spirituals and uppity-ism and have the tone of dread prophecy, swerving from stone-cold anger to bleak despair and back again. The number 2116 appears in the video projection, perhaps a hint that--despite the grieving singer's consigning everyone to hell--society might actually have something like 100 years to get its damn act together. 100 years--but no more.

Destruction continues tonight at 8:30pm and concludes with a 10pm performance on Saturday. Get more information and your tickets here.

Sara (the smuggler), an hour-long event by dance artist Sara Shelton Mann, is a patchwork infused with emotions, a performed life review, a fast trot from childhood through to the now, spoken in a great, gender-blurring, Lauren Bacall but a tad drier voice. (Her essential nature: "I've always felt kind of half on the planet and half off." Of discovering Contact Improvisation: "I got to touch people, and I didn't have to talk.") Her slipped-through history in dance--starring the likes of Alwin Nikolais, Murray Louis and Remy Charlip--was less of a draw for me than her engagement with energy healing, which parallels mine. In this way, her hour did not disappoint as it folded in a guided meditation for her by Keith Hennessy, some shamanic-looking clearing work she unleashed upon the patient Kayvon Pourazar volunteering from the audience, and a vigorous somatic exercise for anyone who cared to participate.  (Closed)

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Young Jean Lee and the naked truth

Untitled Feminist Show--created by award-winning director Young Jean Lee, choreographer Faye Driscoll, associate director Morgan Gould and other collaborators--has earned a place on my mental list of favorite dance events of the very young 2012. I know I'm going to have some explaining to do because--as I see here in Lee's program notes--Lee doesn't consider this work to be a dance piece. "Like the performers themselves," she writes, "the show is meant to resist categorization."

So, what am I talking about?

Well, aside from the fact that I would like to be able to claim every damn good thing in the Universe for dance, I'm beginning to get a sense that calling something "theater" (as she calls her company, after all: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company) is fine and dandy, but calling something "dance" is somehow limiting. 

Hmmm....

Seems it was just yesterday that the idea of calling all sorts of wild and crazy (or mild and boring) things "dance" was bold and liberating.

In any case, Lee's six marvelous stars are performing arts of the body, including dance and some incredibly edgy mime, and they are stark naked throughout the hour. I'm calling this one for dance, and I will not be dissuaded.

I also hear tell--because I've been reading some of her interviews--that she doesn't want Untitled Feminist Show to be considered sexy. Oh, please. Nothing wrong with (or un-feminist about) sexy. Bring sexy back. In fact, this show does so--directly and indirectly.

What couldn't be genuinely sexy about six unselfconsciously nude, female-bodied performers, each with a distinct body type and size, defining themselves across a fluid gender spectrum and expressing, almost entirely in iconic and primal physical movement, how it might feel to be free?

Free is sexy.

They are Becca Blackwell, World Famous *BOB*, Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo), Hilary Clark, Katy Pyle and Regina Rocke, collectively hailing from cabaret, theater, dance and burlesque with some crossovers, all stripped of theatricalizing makeup, hairstyling and, of course, costumes. They make a fabulous team in this fabulous romp, but Blackwell, Zirin-Brown and especially Clark seem to be having the most high-charged and, yes, liberating fun.

Some of them initially enter the space by slowly drifting down the aisles, giving the audience a sense of being represented in the performance space. (They come from us.) We hear their soft and human breathing, which establishes a comforting sense of common humanity. But don't get too comfortable. Although the inhabitants of Lee's feminist utopia sometimes sport frilly pink parasols, they're capable of using these items as weapons, and they'll happily consume their victim. No, you've never seen Marcel Marceau do the kind of mime you'll see in Untitled Feminist Show--at least, not on Ed Sullivan's show.

And check out that acid-trip video projection at the end! Through the Looking Glass, through the black hole you go! What are you going to be when you come out the other side?

With scenic design by David Evans Morris; lighting design by Raquel Davis; sound design by Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney; and projection design by Leah Gelpe.

Untitled Feminist Show is a presentation of Performance Space 122's COIL Festival and runs at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through February 4. For information, schedule and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Jerome Robbins Theater

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)